When the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, the post-modern era of skepticism and pessimism in relation to positive, progressive political change was broken, albeit momentarily. The sight of thousands of people on the streets, demonstrating against corrupt politicians and their own exclusion from the system, filled many across the globe...

This is the latest in a series of articles and illustrations from our new special edition publication New Cartography. The magazine offers readers a fresh and alternative take on mapping the urban environment through a collection of articles and illustrations from a wide array of contributors. The complete magazine can be viewed here. “Maps are pictures...

A spectre is haunting the world- the spectre of Austerity. Deficit-cutting measures now haunt populations across the world and it is the poorest and most vulnerable that are being hit the hardest. Guy Standing in his latest book has termed this class of people The Precariat, those in vulnerable and...

The arts and the historical conditions of their creation are undoubtedly interdependent and not always easily demarcated, with each consistently blurring into the other. As critics such as Frederic Jameson have argued, the stylistic movement over time from realism to modernism and into post-modernism, has in many ways matched capitalism’s...

Much has been written about the domestic implications of the Arab Spring, but the external relevance of the uprising across North Africa and the Arab world has not yet been considered in significant depth. The Tuareg rebellion in Northern Mali has forced this question to the surface. As Gaddafi’s patronage...

Anyone who has been following and studying the conflict between the (now Ugandan government) National Resistance Movement (NRM) and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda, would have woken up to quite a surprise to find a ‘viral’ internet video, emblazoned with the name of Joseph Kony, racking up...

Senegal has long been understood as the bastion of democracy in western-most Africa. The region has seen prolonged conflict in Sierra Leone and Liberia, post-election violence and disorder in Cote d’Ivoire and Tuareg rebellions in Mali. As socio-economic disputes in Senegal turn to public tumult, indolent journalists looking for a...

So here we are again. Another century, another crisis. But this time, power relations have shifted and Europe is on the brink. We now face the possibility that Angola may help to bailout Portugal- its former coloniser. Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos remarked “We’re aware of the difficulties the...

Islamism has in many respects replaced Soviet Communism as the evil Other that the United States defines itself against. The US’s ‘Free World’ mission was always defined in relation to the USSR’s ‘Proletarian Internationalism’- Microwaves and televisions not 5 year plans and planned economies! Yet both sides of the Cold...